A Revolution in Military Ethics?

RALPH PETERS

There is a popular disposition to regard ethics as absolute and
enduring, yet they are neither. That which is considered ethical
alters with time and varies between civilizations and even families.
At some impalpable level, the impulse to ethics does appear to
arise from within and may be a collective survival strategy conditioned
by biological and cultural evolution. Yet the specific content
of a civilization's or a society's ethics is generally determined
by accumulative tradition, epochal convenience, and local habit.
The ethics of war and conflict are especially fluid.

We live in a stage of Western civilization in which nameless casualties
inflicted by bombing campaigns are acceptable, while the thought
of summarily shooting a prisoner of war fills us with revulsion,
even if the blood of war crimes drips from every finger of that
prisoner. We are allowed to impose embargoes that strike the most
powerless members of foreign populations, bringing deprivation,
malnutrition, and deformity to the voiceless, while merely annoying
antagonistic decisionmakers. Yet we must treat foreign entrepreneurs
who torment our poor with narcotics as white-collar criminals
entitled to the legal protections of our own Constitution. Where
is the absolute ethical quality, or even the logic, of this unexamined
behavior? Our military and foreign policy ethics have the nature
of a great historical chain letter that warns but does not reward.

Ethics are enablers. Personal, social, or military, they allow
us to interact without needless viciousness and without generalized
violence to the soul, the body, or society. In the military sphere,
ethics in war allow us to disguise psychologically the requirement
to butcher other human beings, masking the blunt killing behind
concepts such as just war, higher causes, and approved behaviors.
Ethics in war on the part of a Western society do not so much
protect the objects of our violence as they shield us from the
verity of our actions. Military ethics are ceremonial in the religious
sense: they rarify and codify the darkness, implying a comforting
order in the chaos and void. So long as we believe we have behaved
ethically, we can, statistically, bear the knowledge of our deeds.

In our time, much of the debate over what is and is not ethical
military behavior has focused on the overarching issue of just
and unjust wars. But we rarely examine the component parts of
our ethical stance, even when, as in the Allied bombing campaigns
of the Second World War, technological capability proved so enticing
that it canceled ethical restraints that had prevailed in Europe
for over two and a half centuries, since the armies of Louis XIV
ravished the Rhenish Palatinate. Overall, the greatest cause of
perversion in the "logic" of military ethics has been
the rise of technologies that distance the killer from the killed,
impersonalizing warfare and thus dehumanizing this archetypal
male group activity. When English longbowman struck down masses
of French knights with early stand-off precision weapons, chivalry
reacted with a horror that we can no longer grasp. Crecy and Agincourt
marked a profound civilizational change from biological to technological
logic. Warfare was no longer a contest of individual qualities
played out in groups, but a contest of mass against mass, with
the man subordinated to the mechanism. While this enabled the
rise of disciplined armies as we know them, it also offset war
from any individual biological imperative.

Gunpowder weapons furthered this trend dramatically until, today,
only snipers and hapless "peacekeepers" consistently
get a detailed look at their enemies. The enemy has become faceless,
and easier than ever to kill. The unexpected consequence of the
advent of distancing weapons, however, has been that we in the
West find it ever more distasteful to dispose of those enemies
who acquire faces and, thus, identities. The celebratory combat
of the Iliad survives only in the sports contests that
have always been a substitute and preparation for biologically-competitive
warfare. Our wars are, or attempt to be, wars of alienation.

Modern man has dehumanized warfare.

The "Highway of Death" issue in the closing phase of
Desert Storm is a good example. Although the decisionmakers in
Washington, shy of consequences since Vietnam, feared a reaction
of disgust on the part of the American electorate, Americans generally
seem to have been exuberantly proud of the performance of their
military (after having been warned by countless journalists and
disanalytical scholars that their country's weapons did not work
and their kids could not fight). The citizenry of the United States,
in fact, will tolerate enormous amounts of the killing of foreigners,
so long as that killing does not take too long, victory is clear-cut,
friendly casualties are comparatively low, and the enemy dead
do not have names, faces, and families. Our bombing campaign that
prepared the battlefield for the ground attack buried countless
Iraqi conscripts alive in sandy trenches and bunkers, while killing
and wounding tens of thousands more in less dramatic fashion.
The conscripts by and large did not want to be there, but feared
their own leaders and military gendarmerie, and bore little or
no direct responsibility for Iraqi excesses in Kuwait City. We
killed those who did not have the courage to desert. Yet killing
them in their thousands was "legitimate" and untroubling.
Try slapping one prisoner on CNN.

Our most recent campaign in the desert also highlighted another
ethical disconnect: while it was acceptable to bomb those divisions
of hapless conscripts, it was unthinkable to announce and carry
out a threat to kill Saddam Hussein, although he bore overwhelming
guilt for the entire war and its atrocities. We justify this moral
and practical muddle by stating that we do not sanction assassination
in general, and certainly not the assassination of foreign heads
of state. Yet where is the ethical logic in this? Why is it acceptable
to slaughter--and I use that word advisedly--the commanded masses
but not to mortally punish the guiltiest individual, the commander,
a man stained with the blood of his own people as well as that
of his neighbors?

Legalists--and reflexive moralists--will warn that a policy that
sponsors assassinations or supremely-focused military strikes
could degenerate into a license to murder that would corrupt our
institutions and our being. First, that is symptomatic of our
Western tendency to view all things in black and white, as either-or.
Killing a Saddam, and doing it very publicly, does not mean that
we would then wipe out the cabinets of every foreign government
that ran late on its debt repayments. We are capable of judicious
selectivity.

More important, though, is our willful blindness to issues of
guilt, relative guilt, and guiltlessness. Objectively viewed,
our position is perverse and cruel when we allow great criminals
to escape punishment while attacking their subject populations,
infrastructure, or simply their military establishments. Let me
be clear: as a soldier, I do not object to assisting in the battlefield
killing of as many foreign opponents as it takes to accomplish
the mission assigned by my Commander-in-Chief. As a human being,
however, our "ethical" national behavior reminds me
of those feudal squabbles in which minor nobles dueled by killing
and raping each other's serfs and burning unoffending villages.

At its present stage of historical development, the United States
(as well as most other truly Western nations), is incapable of
engaging in an unjust war. Our dilemma is that of defining just
and unjust actions within our wars and conflicts. It is time to
reexamine habits that have come to pass for ethics and ask the
sort of questions that are as controversial as they are uncomfortable
to the man or woman of conscience.

One subject, touched on above, which merits separate study is
the issue of the extent to which technology determines our acceptance
of behaviors as legitimate or not. It appears that technology
is the greatest of temptations in this sphere of human activity;
what is unacceptable from the man is welcome from the machine.
If the soldier shoots a family, he is a war criminal. If a pilot
misses his target and wipes out a family, he has simply had an
unsuccessful mission. The focus is not on the result, but on the
distance between the actor and the object of his actions, on the
alienation between subject and object. Since the pilot "could
not have known" and assumedly did not will the result of
his actions, he bears no guilt. The machine failed, and the machine
is guilty (although the machine's designers bear no blame, so
long as they have designed machines that are linear extrapolations
of previous war machines and they do not explore weaponry that
violates contemporary--or atavistic--taboos, such as chemical
or biological weapons).

The high-performance aircraft is at once an extension of the rifle
and qualitatively different from it. The rifle dehumanized individual
combat to a degree, but beyond-visual-range systems obliterate
the human factor. Sophisticated technological systems with stand-off
capabilities are perceived as the real killing mechanisms, not
their operators. We speak of soldiers entering a town, but of
aircraft--not pilots--flying above it. Much is permitted to the
machine that is forbidden to the man. It is an enormous ethical
failure, yet one that, at least until now, has enabled us to win
conventional wars.

The practical difficulty today lies in the range of unconventional
conflicts, from peacekeeping operations to punitive expeditions
by any other name. The close-in nature of combat in these conflicts
insists on re-humanizing an activity we believed we had successfully
dehumanized. In the streets and alleys of Mogadishu, the divide
between subject and object collapses, and the alienation is cultural,
not physical. This cripples our ability to fight.

The ethical restrictions on our military organizations function
well enough in combat against other militaries, but increasingly
our enemies, our potential adversaries, and even our provisional
partners either do not know or reject our Western ethics (at times
they do not even adhere to the ethics of their own society or
civilization, since some cultures find mass ethics fungible, although
collective taboos are not). We face opponents, from warlords to
druglords, who operate in environments of tremendous moral freedom,
unconstrained by laws, internationally recognized treaties, and
"civilized" customs, or by the approved behaviors of
the international military brotherhood. These men defeat us. Terrorists
who rejected our world view defeated us in Lebanon. "General"
Aideed, an ethical primitive by our standards (and probably by
any standards) defeated us in Somalia. Despite occasional arrests,
druglords defeat us on a daily basis. And Saddam, careless of
his own people, denied us the fruits of our battlefield victory.

Until we change the rules, until we stop attacking foreign masses
to punish by proxy protected-status murderers, we will continue
to lose. And even as we lose, our cherished ethics do not stand
up to hardheaded examination. We have become not only losers,
but random murderers, willing to kill several hundred Somalis
in a single day, but unwilling to kill the chief assassin, willing
to uproot the coca fields of struggling peasants, but without
the stomach to retaliate meaningfully against the druglords who
savage our children and our society.

We must reexamine our concepts of the ethical and the legal.
The oft-lauded Revolution in Military Affairs is consistently
associated with technological capability, but a genuine revolution
in military affairs, one that would upset the trend of history
and shift the nature of war, would be a military doctrine, recognized
by government, that stated that the primary goal of any US war
or intervention would be to eliminate the offending leadership,
its supporting cliques, and their enabling infrastructure. If
our technological capabilities enjoy such great potential, why
not focus research and development on means we can use against
enemy leaders and their paladins? Why continue to grind within
the antique paradigm that insists that the leader is identical
with his (or her) people, and, therefore, punishing the people
or its military representation is a just response to the leader's
offenses?

In antique ages--probably spiritually healthier--the aim of war
between states or proto-state organizations was to kill the enemy
chief or to capture him and display him in a cage. Entire peoples
often suffered, but they were not usually the primary targets,
and their suffering was often an incidental result of the lack
on either side of the technological wherewithal to bound past
intervening armies and populations to reach the ranking offender
and his immediate circle. You had to cut your way through the
mass to reach The Man. Then, with the rise of Western civilization,
leaders realized that it was not a profitable precedent to hurt
each other's persons, and personal combats and direct physical
vengeance between leaders disappeared on our sliver of the planet--and,
later, as we projected our ways, elsewhere. Rulers and leaders
distanced themselves from the hazards of combat and fought by
proxy with armies, then, in our century, with populations. Why
not, for the first time in modern history, refocus military operations
on punishing the truly guilty? In the 20th century, we would have
liked to strike a Hitler directly, but had not the means. So we
destroyed the cultural treasure-house that was Dresden out of
spite.

Current and impending technologies could permit us to reinvent
warfare, once again to attack the instigators of violence and
atrocity, not the representational populations who themselves
have often been victimized by their leadership. The whispered
warning that we do not condone "assassinations" because
we do not want our own leaders assassinated is a counsel of unspeakable
cowardice. First, if leaders will not risk the fate they ask of
their privates, they are not fit to lead their people. Second,
if foreign criminals, official or private, knew that retribution
would be generally swift and always sure, attacks on US leaders--or
US citizens overall--would likely decrease wonderfully. And such
a policy would return us once again to an objectively moral path.
Our current system amounts to punishing the murderer's neighborhood,
while letting the murderer go free.

This is not a prescription for ending conventional war or mass
conflict. The dirty secret is that many human beings like to fight,
and, so long as demagogues can transfer the responsibility for
personal and collective failure onto foreign or otherwise-different
groups, we will have to respond to mass violence, and that will
sometimes require a violent response against the mass. But this
is not an all-or-nothing world. We could revolutionize--and humanize--military
activity by attacking the sources of evil directly and minimizing,
when possible, assaults against the faceless foe and his kin.
Should we only force ourselves to stop and think, who among us
would not be better satisfied with Saddam Hussein dead than with
the ghosts of twenty or thirty thousand or more common Iraqis
rising from the sands of Kuwait and southern Iraq?

And what do we expect or want of our shrunken military establishment?
Haven't we forced ourselves through a threshold requiring dramatically
different strategies and doctrine? Wouldn't a doctrine of the
focused pursuit of guilty individuals and their immediate accomplices
make more sense for our jeweler's military of today? Must we content
ourselves with doctrine still heavy with the legacy of the massive
assembly-line militaries we enjoyed when technology was affordable
in bulk and military service was a broadly accepted responsibility?

It is time to re-humanize warfare.

And old divisions of labor do not hold. Since the long-comfortable
lines between military and law enforcement missions are collapsing
in our fractured world, we must treat the most murderous foreign
criminals who attack our citizens as military targets. Currently,
our drug control policy, at home and abroad, concentrates overwhelmingly
on controlling and punishing those at the bottom of the narcotics
business. We must recognize that foreign criminals who attack
the most vulnerable segments of our citizenry, bringing death
to our streets and disorder to our polity, have no entitlement
to US constitutional protection. The primary difference between
Saddam Hussein and the druglords of Colombia or Mexico is that
Saddam Hussein never attacked the United States or its population
directly.

These issues demand serious debate. Traditionalists who decry
even the possibility of attacking these sources of human misery
in such a manner generally do so from campuses or comfortable
offices. They are out of contact with our citizenry and its needs,
as they are phenomenally out of contact with the sheer violence
of this world. They will immediately push the issue to absurd
extremes, crying out that such a doctrine would amount to giving
our military, which they see through the eyes of Oliver Stone
and their own disdain of service, a license to kill. But the purpose
of a military is to kill, and if you cannot stomach that,
you should not have a military. The only operative question is
whom the military should kill. More important, it would
not be left to sergeants or, in most cases, even to generals to
decide which foreign leaders or criminals should die or be otherwise
punished. That would be the task of our elected and appointed
leaders, or their delegated representatives, as it always has
been.

Even though Hitler never attacked the United States, we saw a
need to go to war against Germany--not merely to admonish Hitler
in policy journals for disturbing the peace. We justified shooting
the most vital man in Japan, Admiral Yamamoto, out of the sky.
And we executed the most-deserving German and Japanese war criminals
after perfunctory trials. We can muster the will to strike
evil at its source, and we must not continue to succumb to the
allure of attacking faceless populations when such actions are
no longer a technological necessity. Today, we increasingly have
the means to execute atrocious leaders and criminal mass-murderers
without firebombing Tokyo or Hamburg. We have the means to prevent
wars and conflicts, or to stop them in their earliest stages,
by aiming our military directly at the responsible parties. Do
we not also have the duty to do so?

The United States enjoys a historically unique position of power,
influence, and cultural empire. Whether we find this crown comfortable
or not, we bear unprecedented responsibilities--and face unanticipated
vulnerabilities. If we truly will protect our citizens, our allies,
and (that most anomalous condition of mankind) peace, it is time
to stand back and reevaluate our conception of what is ethical
in war and in those haunting almost-wars arising from foreign
disorder and international organized crime. We might discover
that our current military ethics are the least humane thing about
us.

Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy
Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for evaluating
emerging threats. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for
Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a
graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College and
holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past
several years, his professional and personal research travels
have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia,
Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia,
Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland,
Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, and Turkey, as well as
the countries of the Andean Ridge. He has published five books
and dozens of articles and essays on military and international
concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, is scheduled
for publication in December 1996. This is his seventh article
for Parameters.